He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence and death. O G.o.d! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he could have gone without breaking Molly"s heart. "Her brain could never have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.
The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.
Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of sand.
And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was surrounded.
Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers were still there in the box of cartridges.
He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he died, and those d.a.m.ning doc.u.ments were found, there would be a slur on his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.
He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant l.u.s.t of battle.
CHAPTER XXIII
_IN MEMORIAM_
Later on news came of that heroic stand made by Tyson and his men--a mere handful against hundreds of the enemy. He had led them in their last mad rush on a line of naked steel; he had fallen first, face downwards, pierced through the back and breast. He died fighting.
Even in Drayton Parva, where all things are remembered, his sins are forgotten. Nay, more, they forbear to speak of his wife"s sins out of respect for the memory of a brave man.
In Drayton Parish Church there is a stained gla.s.s window with a figure of St. Michael; he has a drawn sword in his hand and the flames of h.e.l.l are about his feet. That window is dedicated
TO THE GLORY OF G.o.d AND THE MEMORY OF NEVILL TYSON.
So they remember.
And out there, in the great Soudan, there is a wooden cross that mounts guard over a long mound. Already it is buried up to its arms in the shifting sand; by to-morrow the dead and their place will be one with the eternal desert. And the desert remembers nothing, neither glory nor sin.